Asia

The war in Syria continues to constitute one of the most complex contexts in the Middle East today, with few realistic policy solutions available to end the conflict. That said, the upcoming July 10 debate over the renewal of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2533 (UNSCR 2533) concerning cross-border humanitarian aid marks a flashpoint that […]

The following is the last of four collective summaries published by the Singapore Policy Journal’s reading group on Digital Technology. Each collective summary is a product of the topics discussed and the various research directions of the members of the reading group. The reading group comprises various individuals from multiple backgrounds, providing a multidisciplinary approach […]

Malaka Shwaikh argues that the discourse of resilience is dehumanizing in how it imposes mythical terms on the colonized people worldwide. It deals with them as if they have supernatural ‘coping mechanisms,’ romanticizes them as exemplary in ‘enduring’ everything, obscures their humanity, reduces the depravity of colonial violence, and ignores layers of structural violence they continue to face.

In December 2020, Singapore’s hawker culture was added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, reflecting its immense value to Singaporean culture. Nationwide conversations on key concerns and questions relating to Singapore’s hawker culture were revitalised. What is our hawker culture? As older […]

Decades of impunity for Israel have progressives at a crossroad. What are progressive elected officials willing to do to counter settler colonialism? Anything less than using the full arsenal available to them is complicity.

On March 25, the Singapore Policy Journal hosted its second virtual event of the Spring 2021 semester in collaboration with The Sessions from the NUS University Scholars Programme, titled “Data Go Where? Data Governance in Singapore.” The event included a short small-group pre-event discussion followed by a speaker panel featuring Quek Su Lynn (Director, Government Data Office), Yi-Ling Teo (Senior Fellow, Centre of Excellence for National Security at RSIS), and Timothy Lin (Co-Founder, Cylynx). In both the discussion and the Q&A with the speakers, a variety of ideas were discussed regarding data governance, and the participants were introduced to private and public sector perspectives of some of the challenges that consumers, companies, and the government face in a field that seems ever-growing.

The following is the third of four collective summaries published by the Singapore Policy Journal’s reading group on Digital Technology. Each collective summary is a product of the topics discussed and the various research directions of the members of the reading group. The reading group comprises various individuals from multiple backgrounds, providing a multidisciplinary approach […]

Dilan Okcuoglu’s “Informal Control of the Turkish State: Lived Experiences from Kurdish Borderlands” is part of JMEPP’s upcoming Spring 2021 edition, Beyond Borders: Middle East in Empire, Diaspora, and Global Transitions. The full edition is expected to come out on April 30, 2021. “In 2009, we planted our wheat in front of Turkish soldiers; they […]

The morning of Saturday, April 3rd, reports of an alleged national security threat targeted at the reigning Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II, by his younger half-brother, Prince Hamzah, were headlining news sources across the world. Recently, Prince Hamzah has been publicly critical of King Abdullah II’s rule during the COVID-19 public health crisis.  In a […]

The following is the second of four collective summaries published by the Singapore Policy Journal’s reading group on Digital Technology. Each collective summary is a product of the topics discussed and the various research directions of the members of the reading group. The reading group comprises various individuals from multiple backgrounds, providing a multidisciplinary approach […]

Sarah Anderson and Lionel Oh highlight existing gaps in Singapore’s current legislative and bureaucratic structures for managing data and digital technology. They argue that these concerns extend past any single product or incident; because of the importance of building public trust in the government’s use of digital technology, transparency, privacy, and other ethical considerations should be a fixture of technology policy. The authors also provide recommendations on how these data ethics concerns might be addressed through augmented workstreams which introduce procedures and safeguards for government technology.

In the second part of SPJ’s interview series on sustainability, we continue our conversation with Melissa Low, a research fellow at the Energy Studies Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS), this time focusing on the broader global context and Singapore’s role in it. In light of recent global milestones in climate policy, Melissa shares with us about how they influenced her work in Singapore, as well as her well wishes for Singapore’s climate policy.